The bloody, brutal war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo officially ended in 2002, but a report this week from the International Rescue Committee said an incredible 45,000 people a month still continue to die each month from starvation and disease. A lot of these diseases, like diarrhoea and pneumonia, are not high profile - no one wears wristbands or ribbons on their lapels to raise funds and the charities, like Médecins Sans Frontièrs, who treat sufferers have to ration each packet of rehydration salts to make sure there is enough to go round.

There is something wrong with the way we give aid in wartime. Instead of looking for ways to prevent conflict and keeping countries stable, we wait for them to fall apart. We tend to give the most money when a war is at its highest pitch, after reading stories of brutalities and casualties, and carry on giving until just after a peace deal is signed.

But shouldn't the international community actually intervene very early, when a small amount of cash can dissipate a tense situation that will be much more costly to untangle later on? This year, the UN plans to send 26,000 peacekeepers into Darfur, who will each use 40 times as much water as a Darfuri villager. They will stay, pounding the crumbling roads and using up resources, until the peace deal is signed and will then leave a devastated region and displaced people to rebuild their lives.

This kind of inefficiency also continues once a war ends. The economist Paul Collier has done some important work on the fact that foreign development assistance will be at its most effective three years after the end of the conflict. In reality, aid agencies tend to pour vast sums of money into a region immediately after a conflict ends, but then lose interest at precisely the point that the post-conflict society has built up institutions to administer funds and drive economic growth properly.

Journalists must bear some responsibility for the way they highlight and then forget about conflicts around the world, but it is not the media's job to provide food, medicines, military support and infrastructure to conflict-ridden societies in an efficient, consistent way. That is the responsibility of various UN agencies, the World Bank, charities and departments of development who take on this task and the horrific death rate in Congo shows that they have not yet succeeded.